even if god has no face
by danniisupernova
Summary: Angela visits Zack. Zack/Angela, mentions Angela/Hodgins. Spoilers Season 4, Season 3 finale


even if god has no face

They are very patient with him. They comply with his requests for books. He understands that if he is good, they will treat him almost as if he is a human being again.

He reads all day, every day, unless they let him outside; outside where everything is calm and blissful. The sedatives they give him make everything look as though it's floating in an underwater current.

The faces of all the people he's let down float by him on this current, still smiling. He doesn't smile back.

*

She doesn't visit him often and when she does, it's always brief.

She'll tell him the usual: case, case, Hodgins, Brennan, case, art. She'll bring him more things to read, poetry, fiction, things he requests if she can get her hands on it.

*

Angela isn't usually one for crying. When she tells him about how she and Hodgins fell apart, he wants to comfort her. He tries to hug her and she flinches. He doesn't understand this.

_Physical comfort is usually needed when periods of distress arise, as indicated by tears._

He's learned that it's never as final as that.

*

He had hated fiction before. Now he drinks it all in: places, food, women, anything. Anything tangible. He wants to feel something other then itch of wool on his scarred palms. He wants to feel something when tears well up in Angela's dark eyes.

He's always prided himself on feeling nothing.

*

Sylvia Plath is too complex for him, T.S. Eliot too literary and Pablo Neruda doesn't make sense.

He wonders if Einstein ever read poetry. He thinks about the theory of relativity. It doesn't apply to verse, in his opinion.

*

He brushes tears from her cheek, the tip of his thumb disturbing the wet, matted black lashes under her eye. The curve of her zygomatic arch is smooth. His touch means something more now that his hands are metaphorically bloody. She doesn't flinch this time.

The scar tissue on his hands looks strange and alien. The intricate, random pattern tickles as he spreads his palm against the soft skin of her cheek. She stares, blinking away tears.

He wants to believe that all of this is real.

*

He likes the next book she gives him. He reads snatches of it, like he's eating something delicious. He wants to savor it.

The book is about, oddly enough, a Catholic schoolgirl's choir. He can't understand it at first: it's written in a colloquial format, but he loves it in any case.

It's about being trapped.

*

They let him walk with Angela outside one day. They watch him closely while he's with her. He wonders what they are waiting for.

Angela walks slightly ahead of him on the path in the garden. He watches her walk. The soft corona around her is only the sun, at its usual luminescence this time of day. It isn't her heart or soul. Her heart is only a muscle that will eventually stop circulating her blood. And then she will be dead. Merely a body in which the major organs have stopped working.

He's never let it get to him.

*

When he asks her about Sylvia Plath, she doesn't answer at first. He says that her poetry is too complex for him to understand.

"Too complex for Zack Addy?" She barely smiles when she says this. He can't remember the last time he saw her smile.

_We love you Zack._

"The imagery is…variable. It can mean anything. There is no empirical way to know what she's saying."

"That's the point Zack. It can mean anything you need it to mean. I had a teacher who once told me that poetry was how you saw the face of God. That whatever meaning you drew from it gave God a face for you."

Zack frowns. He takes this into consideration.

*

He rereads _Ariel_.

_Stasis in darkness._

_Then the substanceless blue_

_Pour of tor and distances._

He can almost feel something. He feels at peace with his thoughts. His hands feel whole again. He's calm.

The Master's face lurches out of the darkness. He shakes it away.

_Substanceless isn't a real word_ he notes.

*

They are on the path again.

He wants to reach out and touch her. To feel the tactile quality of her hair against the scars on his hands as opposed to the skin of his face, to feel the weight of her against him. He feels this physical kindness in his mind and it is like a balm.

Her name rises to his lips but he doesn't say it. She would not want that.

*

He understands why they sedate him. They think he is dangerous and uncontrollable.

He will think of the soft sound her pencil makes against the paper, the light against her hair, the sight of her dancing in her office late at night, when she thought everyone had gone home and it will almost incite him to be who they think he is: a dangerous, rebellious, wild thing.

Almost.

*

"You really aren't a Hannibal Lecter type are you?" Angela points out one day when she's convinced the staff that she and Zack should be allowed to have a picnic lunch. They eat under a tree and Zack practically inhales his sandwich. He can feel a large blot of mayonnaise on his right cheek. Angela leans over and wipes it off with a napkin. The touch startles him: it is almost intimate, though her skin is protected from his by the thin shield of paper.

It's almost normal.

And then Clyde, who used to be a wandering schizophrenic rapist, strolls up and tugs at Angela's hair, trying to convince her that he is her father.

*

Zack considers telling her. He's considered telling Hodgins as well. He knows this would be an illogical course of action.

It is tempting though, when she is afraid to touch him.

Finally, on one of her visits, he takes off a mitten to demonstrate the excessive scars. Her mouth falls open to an almost perfect 'o'.

Gingerly, she places the back of his hand in her palm, as if she is reading his fortune. This is impossible of course as fortune telling is a sham and all the lines on his palms have been obliterated.

She traces her index finger over the uneven smoothness of the scar tissue. He wonders if she's looking for a pattern and wants to tell her that, mathematically, randomness is a pattern.

After a moment, she enfolds his hand in her own and kisses him on the forehead. She passes him a physics book and The Bell Jar before she leaves.

*

Hodgins comes to visit him again. Zack is halfway through The Bell Jar.

"Where do you keep getting all these books, man? Cause I've seen the library here and there's nothing half so good as what Sweets tells me you have stashed in your room."

Zack smiles and shrugs. "People bring me things. Not just math problems. Physics problems too."

Hodgins smiles at this.

*

Poetry starts to come more easily to him. It no longer frustrates him. Instead, it helps him to think: asking himself odd questions, helping him to process things differently.

He tells Angela this. He also tells her that to him, according to the edicts of her teacher, God has no face. He waits for her reaction, to gauge the moral issue of something so abstract.

Angela frowns briefly. "Well," she says. "Maybe that's the way it should be."

She hands him The Elegant Universe and Emily Dickinson, which will later turn out to be quite a strange combination.

She brushes his wrist, lightly.


End file.
